The Blög

2013-10-06

As mentioned in the previous posting, the usability of Picasa has been heavily degraded for serious photographers. A discussion in the Picasa forum shed some more light on the issue. Picasa now applies something called "auto enhancement" on every picture. Just to demonstrate one last time, what Picasa considers enhancement, let's compare this original image

with this one, after is has been "enhanced":

It is possible to turn this feature off - if, and only if you are a member of Google+! I have not the slightest interest in becoming a member of any social network, neither Facebook, nor Twitter, and not Google+. So turning off this crap is not possible for me.

Although a few people have commented on some of my images, I have never really used any of the "social" features of Picasa, like sharing images. Why should I "share" an image if I can send the link to the image instead??? After all, that's what the web has been about for the last 20 years.

With plenty of unused disk space left on my personal web server www.oe-files.de, I decided to leave Picasa behind and host all images myself. I wrote some scripts to handle uploading the images, creating thumbnails and arranging the images by tags. The gallery should look unchanged, only the links to Picasa are now missing. If you feel like commenting on a image, just send me an email.

2013-07-10

In the last few weeks, I couldn't resist the impression, that Picasa and Blogger have changed some functions in a way, that these services are no longer usable for serious photographers. What happened?

I am a regular submitter to the birding blog "Sturmmöwe". As this is a community blog with lots of people submitting material, the mail interface of Blogger is used to upload articles and attached images. Until a few weeks ago, these images were usually included more or less unaltered, like this one:

If you click through to the full size image, it contains complete EXIF data, i.e. information about date and time the image was taken, and the equipment used. This is vital information for birders, and I regularly check this type of information using a Firefox plugin called "FxIF" ("Exif Viewer" will work just as well).

A few weeks ago, this information was suddenly missing. After uploading images via mail, they looked like this one:

If you load the full size image, the EXIF data is gone, and according to the information now found instead, this images was post-processed by Picasa. That's really bad...

Then a few days ago, I noticed another serious regression. I mailed this image to the blog:

Just to make sure no one has tampered with it, the full size version is stored on my web server. This is the image that was published on the Sturmmöwe blog:

Compare the two full size images, and you will notice, that the second image has been "post-processed". Contrast and saturation were increased, probably to let the image appear more lively. Unfortunately, this was not the intention of me, the photographer. But more importantly, this process introduced very visible JPEG artefacts. And although the quality was reduced and the EXIF data removed, the size of the image file was increased by 20%!

I complained about this behaviour on the Blogger forum, and was asked to see how the image behaves, when uploaded via the web interface. This is not an option for the Sturmmöwe blog, but for completeness sake, let's try it here in my own blog. This is the image uploaded directly from my Picasa album:

And this is the image uploaded from my local disk:

The preview image of the first image has been post-processed, the second not. But the full size versions of both images are okay, they were not changed, though. Puzzler...

So please Google, remove this feature to post-process images uploaded via mail. According to one reply in the forum, this is configurable. I don't see such an option in my blog, maybe it is only available for Google+ users - for which this feature is probably intended in the first place. When uploading images shot with cellular phones and similar optics, some post-processing may be needed. But when the image has already been enhanced with real image processing software, such automatic adjustments will do more harm than good.

Visually, the differences to the old version are hardly noticeable - that is intentional. I had to struggle with the new APIs to achieve this effect. The only "visible" (or tactile?) enhancement is, that you can use the scrollwheel to move the timeline.

Many thanks to Mike Nosal, who helped me twice with updating the timeline part of the code, his assistance is much appreciated.

In December 2012, Google informed users of version 2 of the Google Maps API, applications should migrate to version 3 by May 2013. Although the API is still available, and will probably be for some time longer, Google has recently shown, that they don't hesitate to pull the plug even on useful applications with a large user base.

Luckily, when the mashup was back online, access count seemed unaffected. A sad reality of this episode was, that during the outage I was contacted by nearly as many people asking for the page, as in all the time since the mashup went online in 2006, and has been available without any significant interruptions since then.

With this experience, I decided not to wait until Google removed the old Maps API, or for someone to take over the page. I started rewriting the mashup myself. I decided to deal with the Google Maps API first, because that seemed more urgent. I fixed the Timeline problem by simply copying the JavaScript code to my server. That is clearly not an option for Google Maps. If that is gone, it is gone for good.

I encountered some problems while converting my code to version 3 of the API, the transition is not as easy as Google wants to make the developers believe. Another disappointment was the help offered by the community. My question was probably not very well articulated, so receiving only two answers was understandable. But all in all less than 10 people actually clicked on the link to even take a look at the page I had problems with.

Anyhow, after some struggles I finally was able to come up with a page that should give nearly the identical look and feel as the old mashup, although it uses the new Google Maps API: